


twice shy

by brophigenia



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Cuddling, F/M, Full Shift Werewolves, M/M, Pack Dynamics, Polyamory, Skin Hunger, Touch-Starved, Werewolf Hunters, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-30
Updated: 2019-09-30
Packaged: 2020-10-28 08:54:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20775872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: “It’s happening again,” Ronan said, low and wretched.(AKA, Ronan is a werewolf, Blue is a werewolf, Joseph Kavinsky and all his pals are werewolves, there is self-loathing and touch starvation and shenanigans.)





	twice shy

**Author's Note:**

> Here's werewolf trash because I am werewolf trash! It was my birthday two days ago and I needed some more werewolf AUs in my life.

Once, when he was very young, Ronan’s father curved a hand around his small skull and said _ you are what stands between the wolves and the sheep, my boy. _

It had been comforting, stirring up pride in his chest, though Ronan hadn’t really understood what he’d meant, then. Ronan had still loved his father with the uncomplicated adoration of a child, then.

Before he knew what Niall was. 

Before he understood what it meant, to be a Lynch. 

Before he knew what was going to happen to him. What he was (always) going to become. 

A_ monster. _Even before the attack. 

Even before the _ Bite. _

(What was the point of praying for a damned thing?) 

***

“Ronan.” Declan sighed, and did not look full-on at his brother, the way he’d not looked full-on at Ronan since It had happened. It, meaning the death of their father. The birth of something terrible. The transformation of Ronan from one damned thing to another. Man to beast. 

“Dicklan.” Ronan snipped back, and there was something in his older brother’s posture that prickled him worse than usual. It was too close to the full moon. Everything felt worse than usual. 

“Have you got everything… prepared?” They were speaking in euphemism, because although Ronan liked to see his brother wince and grimace, he couldn’t stand to do otherwise, either. Not about this. 

“Yes.” He bit out in reply. “It’s done.” _ It’s done, _meaning that the chains were freshly-oiled in the little cellar beneath Monmouth Manufacturing, wolfsbane oil rubbed into the walls and slicked over the trapdoor’s handle. Ready for another three nights of hell, thrashing himself bloody and bruised and broken. Screaming and weeping. Thanking God for Gansey and his soundproofing even as he writhed. Praying he wouldn’t get out. 

Praying he wouldn’t hurt anyone but himself.

“Guys!” Matthew called, done making conversation with the little old ladies of their congregation who always brought him tupperware dishes full of cookies and casseroles, pinching his cheeks pink, leaving him smelling like lavender and old lace. “Can we get Arby’s on the way back?” 

*** 

“It’s happening,” Ronan said, low and wretched, clammy and paler than usual on the floor of Monmouth’s first floor bathroom, half-propped on the edge of the porcelain clawfooted bathtub. He keened and dry-heaved, shuddering, and Gansey knew that nothing would stop this. Nothing he could do would make it cease. 

He could ease it, though, and did, pressing his hands to Ronan’s nape, his face, lowering himself to tangle their limbs together, disregarding the sickly feel of Ronan’s skin against his own. “It’ll be okay,” he said, wooden-tongued and clumsier than he ever was otherwise, not himself on these kind of nights in a different way than Ronan was _ not himself on these kind of nights. _

Ronan groaned and shook and Gansey locked his arms around the trembling bulk of him, wider and stronger and taller but weeping like a frightened child. “M-Mary, Mother of God—“ Ronan tried to pray, spitting the words from between chattering teeth, and could not go on because the pain was so terrible, the chill so all-consuming. 

It hurt so badly he wished for death. It hurt so badly it _ felt _ like death. Like death, but _ worse, _because there was no release. 

Even the flames of hell would have been a welcome relief from _ this, _ his whole body breaking and _ changing, _changing into something unnatural. 

It was time. 

Gansey helped him to his feet, helped him shiver and limp to the open trapdoor. Helped him with the chains, making sure that each mechanism locked and didn’t pinch at his skin, though soon they’d be rubbing the beast’s limbs raw and bloody. Helped him and then _ left _him, left him in the dark beneath the triple-locked trapdoor. 

He retched with the pain. It never got better. Nothing about this was natural, hidden away from the moon so that he could not shift fully, trapped in-between forms, battering himself against the walls with the urge to run. To hunt. To _ kill, _as all werewolves wanted to kill. Indiscriminate. 

***

“Hey, Silver Bullet! Is Timmy in the well again?” Kavinsky called across the Nino’s parking lot, obnoxiously drawn out, leering from behind the Evo’s rolled-down window. It was the first time that Ronan had ever seen Kavinsky so close to the greasiest spoon in Henrietta, and the first time that Kavinsky had brought his… attentions to Gansey’s attention. 

Gansey stiffened almost audibly at Ronan’s side, just a little ahead of him, shoulders like the boughs of a lightning-struck tree, ready to crack. 

For a moment, the beast in Ronan’s chest sent a whoosh of longing from the back of his throat to his cock, _ wanting _ Gansey to crack. _ Wanting _him to take Kavinsky down, though there was as good a chance that Kavinsky would rip out Gansey’s throat, instead. 

(Even _ that _ thought stirred the beast, stirring up thoughts of Kavinsky fucking him, _ claiming _him, slippery with blood, putting him down beneath tooth and claw.) 

“Fuck off, Kavinsky!” Ronan bellowed back, going for nonchalant with one middle finger thrown up. Even that motion hurt, all his limbs screaming with the effort that moving took, the day after the first night of the full moon. 

Kavinsky blew him a kiss and then went roaring out of the lot, wheels screaming, Russian trap music turned up deafeningly loud. 

“What the fuck is _ his _problem?” Noah mumbled, mouth full of curly fries. 

“Bad breeding.” Gansey said with a sneer, throwing an arm around Ronan’s shoulders, snobbish, full of frost. His hand on the back of Ronan’s neck was too-good. Shiver-inducing. 

Too-good, but not enough, either. 

***

“I’m scared, I’m scared, I’m scared,” Ronan cried, face smashed into the tile floor, naked back heaving. Another batch of words and sounds they would not speak of, when the sun rose. 

Gansey’s heart pounded, bile rising in his throat with his helplessness and his own fear. Ronan could hear it, _ smell it. _He shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts. The second night was always worse than the first. 

_ “Touch _ me,” Ronan begged brokenly, hating himself for how badly he _ needed it. _They didn’t talk about this part, either, Gansey kneeling down on the floor to manhandle him with clammy hands, pushing down on the blood-hot back of his neck and putting a bruising grip on Ronan’s left hip, where his father’s killer’s bitemark had scarred over before he’d even been found by Declan, hurt and delirious in the gravel next to their father’s corpse. 

He imagined Adam doing this, instead of Gansey. Imagined Adam’s cool gaze on him, his sneering mouth saying _ pull yourself together, Lynch. _ Imagined him being _ gentle, _ too, rubbing his fine-boned hands down the length of Ronan’s heaving flanks, murmuring _ it’s okay, it’s okay _like Ronan was a rabid thing to be soothed and pitied. It was weakness. 

Gansey locking him up was almost a relief. 

_ Almost. _

He crawled from the hole the next morning, squinting painfully with bloodshot eyes against the weak sunlight streaming in from the windows. He couldn’t meet Gansey’s gaze, but also he couldn’t refuse the hand Gansey offered to help him stand with, even that small connection soothing the frayed edges of his mind. 

In his bedroom, Chainsaw cawed softly at him, _ Kerrah Kerrah Kerrah. _Everything smelled too-strongly, unwashed bedsheets and open, soured bottles of beer and cobwebs. His seldom-used cell phone was vibrating too-loudly against the other debris tossed in the nightstand drawer. 

** _cum run w sum REAl wolfs, lynch_ ** a text from an unknown number read, accompanied by a blurry snapshot of pixelated fur and limbs and one glowing lupine eye, iris bright like molten gold. Impossible to tell what it was unless you _ knew. _

Ronan knew. 

** _where and when? _ **he texted back, and hated himself for the surge of clattering excitement in his bruised chest at the immediate reply. 

** _2nite. woods. _ **

***

_ This is a mistake, _ Ronan’s heart thundered. _ Turn back now. _

“You’ve never had a real Moon Run.” Kavinsky said, eyes brighter than nature. “It’s okay. We’ll show you how, huh, boys?” This last he directed to his… his _ pack, _who all grinned the same kind of grin, toothsome and hungry. 

_ (Wolffish, _even though it was a fucking cliche.) 

“Gonna pop your cherry _ right—“ _ Skov yipped lasciviously, cut off with a yelp as he was tackled to the ground by Swan and all his swarthy bulk. They wrestled and rolled, laughing and making noises that were decidedly _ not _human, shifting and bursting out of their clothing, still rolling around in the torn designer rags and the dirt, biting at each others’ ears and napes. 

Ronan tried not to stare; their transformations had come over so quick and seemingly painless that envy spiked sharply in his gut, another sin to add to the neverending list. What a disappointment he was, to be covetous for an _ easy _transition between man and beast. What a disappointment he was, down to his bones. 

Kavinsky laughed, draping his arms over Ronan’s shoulders and jumping up onto his back obnoxiously. “Sexy, huh?” He purred, nasal but _ low. _“It’s like that every time, when you’ve got a pack to run with.” 

Jiang took another placid drag off of his joint, sitting on the hood of Prokopenko’s car, lazily heeling off his sneakers and hooking off his socks with nimble fingertips. The bottoms of his feet were perfectly clean and pale, the bony curves of his ankles compelling beneath the hems of his sweatpants. He discarded the rest of his clothes in a similarly negligent fashion, graceful to a fault as he flicked away the smoldering roach. The change shivered over him like a release, his body going so naturally from one form to the next that it was like poetry in motion. 

Ronan’s envy _ burned. _

Kavinsky dismounted from Ronan’s back, sauntering out into Ronan’s line of sight. “Proko!” He called, falling down onto the ground so he could lay stretched out like a king, one hand outstretched. Prokopenko, already shirtless, barefoot, and brooding up against a nearby tree, made a swaggering show of unbuckling his belt. 

He shifted in an aggressive lunge, hitting the ground on four paws so he could press his nose against Kavinsky’s palm, the inside of his wrist, nosing up into his armpit while Kavinsky took hold of his scruff in one easy fist. 

All of Kavinsky’s wolves followed Prokopenko’s lead, laying on or around their leader as he grinned smugly up at Ronan, no less in control of the situation and everyone in it for his place on the ground. 

“Well, Lynch?” Kavinsky laughed, eyes gone bloodred. “Whip it out.” 

The moon was fat and full overhead. 

Ronan was nauseous with the need to shift, even as he trembled with fear. He’d come out here wanting to _ see, _ wanting to _ know, _free under the full moon on two legs for the first time since his father died. 

(Free, but chained, still.) 

“I—“ he tried to say, and then his teeth were too long, his jaw too long, his throat only suited for howls and growls. 

He made a strangled noise somewhere in between, and allowed himself to take the place Kavinsky and his pack had left for him, beneath Kavinsky’s right hand. 

Their howls were triumphant, an unholy chorus to herald Kavinsky’s own shift, gone from hell-eyed boy to black-furred wolf in the endless vacuum space between one second and the next. 

***

“Would it help?” Gansey asked quietly, looking up from above the lenses of his wireframe glasses, hunched over his desk in a raggedy Aglionby Crew sweater that Ronan itched to steal, to put around his pillow like a pillowcase so he could sleep surrounded by the full scent of Gansey. Of _ pack. _

“What?” Ronan asked tiredly, stupidly, loose-limbed and jelly-legged still from the exhaustion and joy that the Moon Run with Kavinsky’s pack had brought. 

“If I— if _ we—“ _ Gansey paused, sugar baron sensibilities visibly rearranging themselves in his well-formed skull. He stood from his desk and got closer, bringing more of his scent and his body heat. “Jane says that you probably… liked it. Running with Kavinsky and his dogs.” Ronan’s mouth opened to spew denials but Gansey cut him off with a hand curved around the side of his neck, thumb resting just above his carotid. Ronan’s eyes narrowed, even as the rest of his body _ sang. _ What _ exactly _ was Sargent _ teaching _ him? 

“And?” Ronan asked, tone shooting for wrathful but ending up somewhere in the vicinity of bitchy instead. 

“We could do that for you. Jane, Adam, Noah, and I.” Gansey was as earnest as a Kennedy, volunteering for something he couldn’t know, couldn’t _ understand. _ Offering up himself and their friends as martyrs to Ronan’s selfishness, his _ weakness. _

“No.” Ronan made himself say, and hated how it sounded like _ please. _

“Ronan.” Gansey said, low and serious, leaning their foreheads together. The frames of his glasses brushed against Ronan’s eyelashes. They were too close to see each other properly. Gansey was a golden-skinned blur that smelled like melted sugar and peppermint leaves and _ warmth. _

_ “Gansey.” _Ronan murmured, a surrender of a word. 

***

“They don’t understand.” Kavinsky whispered hotly, pressing him up against the wall behind Monmouth where he’d been waiting to spring. There was preternatural strength behind his movements, his lean limbs that shouldn’t be able to overpower Ronan’s muscle and bulk. Ronan should’ve been able to shake him off. 

Ronan should’ve _ wanted _ to shake him off, but he didn’t, the beast inside of him clawing suddenly at his throat, rabid and hungry. He felt like vomiting. He felt like keening. He felt like _ murder, _ and something simmered low down in his belly that he knew was _ sex, _ or at least the want of it. He remembered how it felt to run with Kavinsky and his pack, paws on the forest floor, everything _ sharpened, _ everything _ better. _

It had been the first full moon where he didn’t feel like hanging himself from the rafters the next morning. 

He remembered the feeling of their nipping at his heels, Skov and Swan and Jiang. Remembered the gaze of Prokopenko on them all, ranging yards behind them but only because he wasn’t going to let them be taken unawares. Remembered how it felt when K had put him down, wrestled him to the ground after they’d shifted to their fur, pinned him and put teeth in his nape and _ made _ him submit. It was like everything had fallen into place, like everything had gone still and _ okay _and quiet for the first time since the Bite. 

It had felt so _ good. _

“You don’t understand either.” Ronan said to the brick, rough against his lips, bringing beads of blood to the surface. He meant it. Kavinsky made a low, wounded sound. He wondered what the look on Kavinsky’s face was like, if he was holding Ronan pinned like this for more reasons than just to keep him from running away. 

It had felt so _ good, _ but still _ wrong, _ the next morning. He’d woken up centered, but when he’d realized whose naked limbs he was tangled up in he’d been _ nauseous _ with the wrongness of it. The physicality had been what he craved, what he needed. 

He didn’t need it from _ Joseph Kavinsky, _though. 

“You looked like you’re supposed to be ours, in the moonlight.” K said, and his hand found Ronan’s bare skin, up under his shirt, feathering over his tattoo, tracing the line of his spine all the way down until he was stopped by the waist of Ronan’s jeans. His tone was very flat, inhumanly detached in comparison to his heavy words and his hot touch. 

“Everything looks different in the moonlight.” Ronan countered, and felt Kavinsky’s pain in the shuddering sigh he let out, bringing up goosebumps in its wake. 

“Dick’s not gonna be able to give it to you like we could.” The meaning was clear. Not a threat, or at least not entirely. A warning, a piece of advice, a lament. 

When he released Ronan and stepped back, Kavinsky looked washed out, tired in the sunlight in a way he didn’t at night, when his eyes glowed like flares and his teeth flashed like knives. 

In the night, he was a terrible thing, a king and a demon and a _ wolf. _In the day, he was only a kid, sixteen and exhausted, hands shaking from going too long without a pill or a smoke or a fuck. 

Ronan could relate. In the night, he was a weak thing, cold and frightened and raw. 

But it wasn’t night. 

He swung his fist into Kavinsky’s face, catching him by the shirt so he could put _ Kavinsky _up against the wall. 

“You’re not gonna give me _ anything.” _Ronan said, chin down to cover his throat. 

Something in his expression made Kavinsky keep quiet, though he’d never been one to _ not _run his mouth. 

There was nothing to say. Ronan had made his choice. 

***

“Why don’t you— have this problem?” Gansey murmured into the receiver, laying in his bed in the dark without his glasses or contacts. He’d been reading an epic poem about the Lady of Shallot that had obscure references to Glendower until he felt as if his eyes were going to burn themselves out of his skull. 

He’d called Blue even as he was crawling beneath the covers, waiting on the line for one of her younger cousins to go get her and listening to their whispered giggles while shouts of _ Blue, it’s one of your boyfriends! _rang out tinnily in the background. 

Finally Blue had said _ hey, _all other noise cutting off sharply as she presumably threatened everyone in the vicinity of the Telephone Room with bodily harm if they didn’t shut up. 

“I was born like this.” Blue answered him; he could hear the exhaustion he felt mirrored in her voice. He closed his eyes and imagined her in bed next to him, warm as a furnace, speaking in that gravelly half-asleep voice. 

It was wrong of him, but Gansey couldn’t bring himself to care. Ronan was out, probably exercising his deathwish on the quiet streets of Henrietta. There was no one to hear what he was thinking. _ He _didn’t live in a house full of psychics. 

“Tell me about it.” He requested, turning his face away from the phone as he yawned, trying to conceal the sound. 

“Go to sleep, Gansey.” Blue said, unable to keep the betraying fondness from her admonition. Despite her order she kept talking.

He fell asleep imagining Blue as a small child, shifted and curled up at Persephone’s side, chewing with puppyish teeth at the fringes of a silk shawl, with her voice still murmuring warmly in his ear. 

***

“You don’t have to do this.” Ronan said, not looking Adam in the face because he’d picked a time for this heart-to-heart when he knew Adam would be beneath some banged up car, on his back with nothing but his legs showing. 

“Do _ what?” _ Adam replied, annoyed but not to the point that he _ wouldn’t _ be a douchebag about the whole thing. It was one of the things Ronan liked the most about Adam Parrish. 

“Audition for the fucking Icecapades. What the fuck do you _ think?” _Ronan snapped back, feeling more himself than he had in weeks. 

Adam heaved a full-body sigh and then rolled out from beneath the shitty Camry he’d been working on. There was a smudge of oil on his cheek. He propped himself up on his elbows, throwing the hard-won muscles in his arms into sharp relief. The line of his jaw was knife-sharp. 

“We’re not going to find Glendower if you and Gansey are spending all your time dealing with your…” Adam paused, his meticulously-mimicked manners falling short in the face of delicately dancing around the subject of lycanthropy, like _ werewolf _ was some kind of antiquated racial slur to be avoided by Democrats and Republicans alike. _ “Problem.” _

In any other situation, Adam’s visual, internal debate over proper terminology for the existential struggles of creatures of the night would’ve been peak comedy. 

As it was, Ronan didn’t know whether to bare his teeth or cover his face. 

“Christ, Parrish. You _ do _care.” He settled on, adopting Adam’s sneer and turning it even more vicious. 

“Not on your life, Lynch.” Adam responded, like he meant _ I’m doing this, and you can’t scare me off of it. _

“Yeah, yeah.” Ronan muttered, crossing his arms and settling against the wall, watching Adam go back to his work. He loved the smell of the garage, gasoline and leather and _ Adam. _

Beneath the car, Adam hummed a tuneless rendition of _ Hungry Like the Wolf. _Too quiet for anyone else to hear, if they didn’t have Ronan’s sharp ears. 

***

Sargent’s approach to the change was as challenging as her approach to everything else, starting with cracking her knuckles and unclipping all the multicolored barrettes from her hair. They made delicate _ plink_s as she dropped them onto the counter, her nose wrinkling again as she took in the toilet inches away from their fridge. Her dismissal of their domestic failings was almost primordial in its femininity, soothing for its predictability. 

Ronan couldn’t take his eyes off of her; she was the easiest thing to look at in the room. Gansey was nearly vibrating with nerves, contagious like the Plague, and Adam— 

_ Adam, _ hot-skinned and keen-eyed and _ there, _ ready to throw himself onto the pyre of Ronan’s weakness. His _ neediness. _

So it was Sargent, who had moved from removing hair adornments to skinning off her safety-pin-adorned tee shirt, baring luminous brown skin, that Ronan kept his eyes on. She was nervous, too— he could smell it. He could _ feel _it, the waves of her trepidation in the air. 

He was sweating through the spare amount of clothes he’d put on for this, boxer briefs and an undershirt so he wouldn’t have to wrestle awkwardly with jeans and boots and jacket. He felt exposed, and dreaded the final removal of his clothing. The baring of his skin and his ink and his _ scars. _

Sargent quirked a challenging brow at him as she pushed her skirt down her hips, leaving her in her decidedly utilitarian cotton underwear, mismatched in color— neon green bra and pale purple underwear. “Ready, Lynch?” She asked, and didn’t wait for him to acquiesce before she rolled her shoulders and twisted her whole body into the movement of the change, shaking off the scraps of brightly-colored cotton and elastic. 

She was a small wolf, fur as black as Kavinsky’s but shaggier, disguising just how lean she had to be around the ribs. Her eyes were solemn when she bared her teeth to him, deliberate. There was nothing but her gaze, then, and Ronan’s nervousness tapered off, eased until it was nothing, until he was just left in the clammy remnants of his cold sweat, damp fabric clinging to him uncomfortably as Blue circled him. 

He chanced a look over his shoulder. Gansey and Adam stood very still, holding their hands at their sides and keeping their shoulders squared as they watched. They were afraid, but trying not to be. 

Ronan was not afraid. Not anymore. He arched his neck into the first crackling ripple of the change, leaning into the transformation in a way he never had before, not even on the night when he’d run with Kavinsky and his five-strong pack. 

Blue’s slow circles got smaller and smaller, until she brushed against him with each step, her fur ticklish against his already-oversensitive skin. He reached down a hand to brush over the shaggy fur on top of her head and then with a single cry he was changed, unfleshed. He opened his eyes as the wolf and _ was _ the wolf, not divorced from his other side the way he usually was. There was no beast except for the beast he himself was— no parasite, no leech. 

He was Ronan. 

He was the beast. 

(He always had been, hadn’t he?) 

Blue set her sharp teeth into his scruff and did not let go even when he trembled; he didn’t try to fight her off but instead went lax, limp beneath her grip, which was gentle enough not to break skin. When he bared his throat more for her she snuffled at the exposed expanse of vulnerability. When she seemed to deem him settled, she flopped her smaller body down on top of his, hiding him with her mass as much as she could with their size difference. 

It felt _ good _. Secure. He was balanced with it, calm under her weight even with the moon looming high in the sky outside. 

Hands in his fur reminded him of the continued presence of Gansey and Adam, who had left their place on the far wall and curled their soft-skinned bodies around the pair of them, heat and muscle and _ scent. _Even Noah had materialized, scent odd and faded and ticklish to his nose like a memory instead of a real thing hanging in the air. He laughed when Blue licked his face, nuzzling her nose into his cheek as he settled his weightlessness down among them. 

He could feel the moonlust in his limbs, the want to _ run, _ to _ hunt, _ but it was easier to ignore than it had ever been before because of their presence, better-fitting than Kavinsky and his pack had been. The scent and weight and heat of them filled up his head until there was nothing to ignore, to deny; he was here, and here was _ pack. _

It was enough. 

***

**Author's Note:**

> follow me @ brophigenia.tumblr.com


End file.
